Part of the ‘voter purge’ lists that illegally disenfranchised thousands of Florida voters. [Source: Salon]Soon after Jeb Bush (R-FL) becomes governor of Florida minority voters are increasingly purged from the Florida voting rolls. In his unsuccessful 1994 run for governor, Bush had won the animus of African-American voters by showing a lack of interest in their concerns; during one debate, when asked what he would do for Florida’s black community, he answered, “Probably nothing.” He avoided such comments in his 1998 campaign, and won the election though he secured only 10 percent of the black vote. In his first year as governor, Bush eliminates many affirmative action programs and replaces them with what he calls the “One Florida Initiative,” which in effect grants state contracts almost exclusively to white male business owners. Black legislators, led by Democratic State Senator Kendrick Meek among others and joined by the NAACP, decide that they will mount a voter registration drive—“We’ll Remember in November”—to defeat Governor Bush and his allies, and to challenge Bush’s brother, Texas Governor George W. Bush, in his drive to the presidency (see 9:54 p.m. December 12, 2000). Veteran civil rights leader Elmore Bryant later says, “We didn’t need George W. doing to the whole nation what Jeb was doing to Florida.” Some Florida NAACP officials have a nickname for the governor: “Jeb Crow.” Black voters begin registering in unprecedented numbers. Removing Black 'Felons' from the Rolls, Keeping Other Blacks Off - Bush and his allies decide to begin focusing on convicted felons (see June 24, 1974), pivoting off of a 1997 discovery that 105 convicted felons had illegally voted in a Miami mayoral election. Under Florida law, convicted felons are ineligible to vote. Seventy-one percent of convicted felons found on county voting rolls are registered Democrats, and the majority of those are black. Bush and the Republican-led Florida legislature pushes through a sweeping voter fraud bill opposed by almost every county elections supervisor in Florida. It mandates the strict enforcement of an obsolete 1868 law that took the vote away from all former prisoners who had not received clemency from the governor’s office no matter what their crimes or their circumstances. Only 14 states do not automatically restore a convicted citizen’s civil rights upon the completion of their prison sentence; Florida is one of those states. Florida’s population is only 15 percent black, but its prison population is 54 percent black—a huge disproportion. Convicted felons who ask for clemency usually are denied such clemency, no matter how much they had managed to clean up their lives—by 2000, less than 0.5 percent of former prisoners have regained their rights to vote. Meek later says that he has helped 175 former felons apply for clemency; only nine, he will say, succeed in regaining their voting rights. 17 percent of Florida’s black voting-age males are disenfranchised as of 2000. Florida leads the nation in its number of disenfranchised voters. Moreover, Florida leads the nation in charging juveniles with felonies, thusly depriving young citizens of their rights to vote even before they are old enough to exercise them. Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones says: “And every year the Florida legislature is trying to make more crimes felonies. Why? So they can eliminate more people from the voter rolls.… It’s been going on in Tallahassee for years.” By April 1998, as Jeb Bush’s campaign for governor is in full swing, the legislature mandated a statewide push to “purge” voter rolls of a wide variety of ineligible voters—those who have moved and registered in a different county or state, those considered mentally unstable, those who are deceased, and most significantly, convicted felons who have not had their rights restored. Voters such as Willie David Whiting, a Tallahassee pastor who has never been convicted of a crime, testified that they were denied their rights to vote because the lists conflated him with felon Willie J. Whiting. The purge list parameters considered him a “derived,” or approximate, match (see November 7, 2000). Whiting had to threaten to bring his lawyer to the precinct before being allowed to vote. “I felt like I was slingshotted back into slavery,” he testified. He tried to understand why he and so many others were denied their right to vote. “Does someone have a formula for stealing this election?” he says he asked himself. Overall, the new purge lists are hugely disproportionate in including black citizens. Hillsborough County’s voting population is 15 percent black, but 54 percent of its purged voters are black. Miami-Dade County’s voting population is 20 percent black, but 66 percent of its purged voters are black. Leon County’s voting population is 29 percent black, but 55 percent of its purged voters are black (see Early Afternoon, November 7, 2000). Privatizing the Purge - The legislature contracts out the task of providing a “purge list” to a Tallahassee firm, Professional Analytical Services and Systems, using state databases. The results are riddled with errors that would cost huge numbers of Florida voters their right to vote. In August 1998. Ethel Baxter, the Director of the Florida Division of Elections, orders county elections supervisors not to release the list to the press in order to keep the list from generating negative publicity. Instead, the state awards a second contract, this time to Boca Raton’s Database Technologies (DBT). (DBT later merges with ChoicePoint, an Atlanta firm.) DBT produces two separate lists, one in 1999 and another in 2000, that included a total of 174,583 alleged felons. Later, a small number of convicts who had been granted clemency are removed from the list. The majority of the people on the lists were black, and presumably Democrats. DBT employees referred to the people on the list as “dirtbags,” among other epithets. When citizens begin learning that they are on the lists, and begin filing complaints, DBT product manager Marlene Thorogood expresses surprise. In an email, she says, “There are just some people that feel when you mess with their ‘right to vote’ your [sic] messing with their life.” By late 1999, it becomes apparent that the DBT lists are as riddled with errors as the first lists. Thousands of Florida citizens who had never been convicted of felonies, and in many cases no crimes at all, are on the lists. Some people’s conviction dates were given as being in the future. Angry complaints by the thousands inundated county elections supervisors, who in turn complain to Tallahassee. Handling the Complaints - The person designated to compile the list is Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell IV, an assistant general counsel to the Florida Division of Elections. Mitchell, who is later promoted to a senior position in the Department of Education a week after the November 2000 elections, claims he tries to “err on the side of caution” in listing voters to be purged. But testimony and statements from county supervisors, state officials, DBT employees, and others paint a different picture. When warned in March 1999 of the likelihood of tens of thousands of “false positives”—names that should not be on the list but are because of similarities in names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and the like—Mitchell tells Thorogood that the primary purpose of the lists is to include as many people as possible, false positives or not. It is the job of the county supervisors, he says, to weed out the legitimate voters from the lists. When told by DBT personnel that loose parameters for the names were causing an inordinate number of false positives, Mitchell, as directed by senior government officials, actually loosens the parameters instead of tightening them, ensuring tens of thousands more names on the list, and resultingly more false positives. DBT also includes names of convicted felons from other states in making up its lists, though 36 states automatically restore their prisoners’ rights upon completion of sentences. Thusly, over 2,000 residents of other states who had served their sentences, had their rights restored, and moved to Florida now find their voting rights illegally stripped by the purge list. In May 2000, some 8,000 names, mostly those of former Texas prisoners included on a DBT list, are found to have never committed anything more than a misdemeanor. Their names are eventually removed from the lists. (Subsequent investigations find that at least one of the Texas lists came from a company headed by a heavy Republican and Bush campaign donor.) Mitchell later admits that other such lists, equally erroneous, are incorporated into the purge lists, and those names are not removed. Before the 2000 elections, an appeals process is instituted, but it is tortuously slow and inefficient. Civil Rights Commission attorney Bernard Quarterman says in February 2001 that the people who filed appeals are, in essence, “guilty until proven innocent.” In its contract, DBT promises to check every name on the list before including it by both mail and telephone verifications, but it does not, and later contracts omit that procedure. Asked by Nation reporter John Lantigua about concerns with the lists, Mitchell dismisses them, saying: “Just as some people might have been removed from the list who shouldn’t have been, some voted who shouldn’t have.” Lantigua writes: “In other words, because an ineligible person may have voted somewhere else, it was acceptable to deny a legitimate voter the right to vote.” Mitchell verifies that he himself did not set the loose parameters for the lists, but that they came from Baxter in consultation with Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After). County Supervisors Battle the Lists - Some county elections supervisors work diligently to comb through their lists and restore legitimate citizens’ voting rights. Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho testifies after the elections, “Our experience with the lists is that they are frequently erroneous.” He tells the Civil Rights Commission that he received one list with 690 names on it; after detailed checking by himself and his staff, 657 of those names were removed. Mitchell actually tells elections supervisors not to bother with such checks. Linda Howell, the elections supervisor for Madison County, later says: “Mr. Mitchell said we shouldn’t call people on the phone, we should send letters. The best and fastest way to check these matters was by phone, personal contact, but he didn’t want that.… We shouldn’t have had to do any of this. Elections supervisors are not investigators, and we don’t have investigators. It wasn’t our responsibility at all.” The process for unfairly purged voters to clear their names is slow and inefficient, and the backlog of voters waiting to have their names cleared by the Office of Executive Clemency was anywhere from six months to a year in duration. [Tapper, 3/2001; Nation, 4/24/2001]Subsequent Investigation - A later investigation by the progressive news magazine The Nation will document widespread voter disenfranchisement efforts in Florida (see April 24, 2001).

Florida, already using controversial and error-ridden “purge lists” to remove tens of thousands of minority voters from the voting rolls (see 1998 and After), uses voting machines and voting procedures to disenfranchise eligible voters. The Florida elections system is grossly underfunded, resulting in the use of obsolete and error-prone machines (disproportionately used in counties with large minority populations), and elections officials lacking fundamental training and even information about their jobs. During most of 2000, county supervisors warn Tallahassee that Florida could expect an unprecedented number of voters on November 7, especially among the black voting community. But Secretary of State Katherine Harris (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After) and Division of Elections chief Clay Roberts, by their own subsequent testimony, fail to address the problem. Roberts tells Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, “It’s not that bad.” Thusly on November 7, 2000, many polling places experience massive difficulties. An investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) turns up thousands of voters who are turned away for a number of reasons, including but not limited to being on the purge lists. Some voters who registered are not listed on the voting rolls—many of whom were registered through NAACP efforts to register voters via the “motor voter” procedures (see May 20, 1993). County supervisors calling Tallahassee with questions and problems routinely find themselves unable to get through. Many precincts lack access to central voter rolls to verify questionable registrations. Some voters who are in line to vote at the 7:00 p.m. closing time are told to leave, even though the law mandates that any voter standing in line to vote can vote even if closing time occurs. Florida law also allows voters whose status is questionable to complete affidavit votes that will be counted later after their eligibility is confirmed, but many election workers know nothing of these procedures, and thusly many voters who are eligible to vote via affidavit are not given that opportunity. Many disabled voters find no procedures in place to allow them access to voting machines. Many precincts lack procedures to assist Spanish-speaking voters, including failing to provide bilingual ballots or bilingual poll workers. (The Voting Rights Act of 1965—see August 6, 1965—mandates that such provisions be made at every polling place without exception.) The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund later concludes that several thousand Hispanic voters are disenfranchised because of these failures. Black voters in Leon County complain that the Florida Highway Patrol set up a roadblock that denied them access to their polling place (see 11:30 a.m. November 7, 2000); Highway Patrol authorities later admit the existence of the roadblock, but say that it was a routine vehicle inspection checkpoint. Punch Card Voting - Florida generally uses two voting systems—the more sophisticated computer “optiscan” system, which features ballots where choices are made by “bubbling in” an oval with a pencil and then feeding into a scanner, and the obsolete “punch card” system, which uses “punch cards” where choices are made by a voter “punching” a hole in a card with a stylus and then feeding the card into a scanner. Counties with large African-American populations are disproportionate in having to use the obsolete punch card machines. In four of these counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Duval—over 100,000 votes are discarded due to problems with punching the holes correctly (see November 9, 2000). This total is more than half the discards in the entire state. Of the 19 precincts in the state with the highest rate of discard, 18 are majority-black. Seventy percent of black Floridian voters are forced to use the punch card machines, a percentage far higher than that of other ethnic groups. The NAACP later sues to force Florida to discard punch card machines entirely. The Florida government’s response to the punch-card disenfranchisement can perhaps be best summed up by a statement made by Republican House Speaker Tom Feeney, who responds to a question about the infamous “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County (see November 9, 2000) by saying: “Voter confusion is not a reason for whining or crying or having a revote. It may be a reason to require literacy tests.” Literacy tests, a legacy of the Jim Crow era of massive voter discrimination, are unconstitutional (see 1896 and June 8, 1959). [Tapper, 3/2001; Nation, 4/24/2001]Subsequent Investigation - A later investigation by the progressive news magazine The Nation will document widespread voter disenfranchisement efforts in Florida (see April 24, 2001).

Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate, calls Republican contender George W. Bush to retract his concession of the presidential election (see 2:30 a.m. - 3:15 a.m. November 8, 2000). “Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore says. “The state of Florida is too close to call.” Bush says: “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling me back to retract your concession.” Gore responds, “You don’t have to be snippy about it.” Bush informs Gore that his brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, has assured him he has already won Florida (see 2:15 a.m. November 8, 2000 and November 7-8, 2000). Gore replies, “Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this.” Instead of giving a concession speech as planned, Gore sends his campaign chairman, former Commerce Secretary William Daley, to speak to the gathering at Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza. “Our campaign continues,” Daley says. New polling data shows that Florida, still projected to go to Bush as the last needed electoral victory, is once again too close to be accurately predicted. Bush calls his cousin John Ellis, who is anchoring Fox News’s election night coverage (see October-November 2000), and says, “Gore unconceded.” Ellis responds, “You’re kidding.” Within the hour, the networks will, for the second time (see 9:30 p.m. November 7, 2000), retract their projection and classify Florida as “too close to call” (see 3:57 a.m. - 4:15 a.m. November 8, 2000). Bush campaign chairman Donald Evans orders aides to be on a 6 a.m. flight to Florida to begin contesting the recounts. Gore aides give similar orders to their personnel. [CNN, 12/13/2000; Tapper, 3/2001; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008]

A ‘New York Post’ headline from the morning of November 8. [Source: Authentic History]After Democrat Al Gore retracts his concession in the Florida presidential elections (see 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000), the presidential campaign of Republican George W. Bush makes a decision to focus on one single message: their candidate has won the election, won the presidency, and anything else is wrong. In 2001, author Jake Tapper will write that in his brief conversation with Gore, “Bush doesn’t let on that he knows Florida is still in play. From this moment on, Bush and his team will propagage a myth, repeating it over and over to the American people: he won, definitively, at the moment his cousin called the election for him on Fox News Channel (see 2:15 a.m. November 8, 2000).… [E]verything that happens from this point on is crazy, illegitimate Gore-propelled nonsense.” [Tapper, 3/2001]

Katherine Harris. [Source: AP/Pete Cosgrove]Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, one of eight co-chairs of the Florida Bush election campaign and the state official ultimately in charge of election procedures, is introduced to the politics of the Florida presidential recount by a ringing telephone. She is awakened at 3:30 a.m. by a call from the Bush campaign chairman Donald Evans, who puts Governor Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, on the line. Governor Bush asks coldly, “Who is Ed Kast, and why is he giving an interview on national television?” Harris is unsure who Kast is for a moment. Kast is the assistant director of elections, whose division reports to her office. He is on television talking about the fine points of Florida election law (see 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000), when and how manual recounts can be requested, and, most importantly, the driving concept of “voter intent”—if a ballot shows the intent of the voter to cast a vote for a candidate, then that vote will be counted. The governor does not want the media narrative to focus on recounts and voter intent, and has already tasked his general counsel with the job of getting Kast off the air as quickly as possible. (CNN “loses” Kast’s transmission in mid-sentence minutes later.) Democrats have questioned the propriety of having the Florida official with ultimate authority over elections being a state chairman for a presidential campaign before now, and in the coming days, the question will devolve into outright accusations of partisanship and impropriety. Harris has called herself “thrilled and honored” to be part of the Bush campaign, and served as a Bush delegate during the Republican National Convention. During the campaign, she often traveled around Florida representing the ticket. Representative Robert Wexler (D-FL) says of Harris: “She is clearly a partisan Republican—and there’s nothing illegal about that. And I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, expecting them to perform their public functions appropriately. But her actions will speak volumes about whether she is qualified. If she does this fairly, fine. But if she acts as an emissary for Bush to steal this election in Florida, she will delegitimize Florida’s vote count.” Harris gives some initial media interviews on November 8, and according to a 2004 Vanity Fair article, “appear[s] overwhelmed and uninformed.” She does not know what county elections supervisors have been doing, and seems unaware of the chaos surrounding the Palm Beach County “butterfly ballot” (see November 9, 2000) and other ballot disputes. The Bush campaign senses trouble and assigns Harris a “minder,” Florida Republican lobbyist Mac Stipanovich, a former campaign advisor for Jeb Bush and a close Bush ally. Stipanovich, the Vanity Fair article will observe, “appealed to Harris’s grandiosity. (Her emails replying to Bush supporters later revealed that she had begun identifying with Queen Esther, who, in the Old Testament, saved the Jews from genocide. ‘My sister and I prayed for full armour this morning,’ she wrote. ‘Queen Esther has been a wonderful role model.’) He told her that nothing less than the course of history rested on her shoulders. ‘You have to bring this election in for a landing,’ he repeated again and again.” Under Stipanovich’s tutelage, Harris quickly learns to stay on message and repeat the given talking points. Stipanovich, who remains out of sight of the media, will later describe his daily routine with Harris to documentary filmmaker Fred Silverman, saying: “I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators, and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.” [Salon, 11/13/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Most importantly to the Bush campaign, Harris is a part of the campaign’s message propagation plan to insist that Bush has indisputably won the Florida election (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000).

George W. Bush (R-TX), reiterating the message of his campaign that he has indisputably won the Florida elections (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000), meets with reporters on the patio of the governor’s mansion in Texas, accompanied by his vice-presidential running mate, Dick Cheney. Bush tells reporters: “This morning brings news from Florida that the final vote count there shows that Cheney and I have carried the state of Florida. And if that result is confirmed in an automatic recount, as we expect it will be, we have won the election.” Bush is referring to the machine recounts triggered by the closeness of the election results (see Early Morning, November 8, 2000). Bush tells reporters that the race will “be resolved in a quick way,” a statement contradicted by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who says the questions surrounding the race “will not be resolved for 10 days.” Harris will soon be brought to heel and make statements as authorized by the Bush campaign (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After). Bush takes a single question, then he and Cheney leave the lectern without speaking further. For his part, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore urges that the process be carried out “expeditiously but deliberately—without a rush to judgment.” Gore says: “We now need to resolve this election in a way that is fair, forthright, and fully consistent with our Constitution and our laws. What is at issue here is the fundamental fairness of the process as a whole.” Bush campaign aides tell reporters that they are preparing to transition into the White House, with Bush naming Cheney to head the White House transition team and former Ford Motors executive Andrew Card named as White House chief of staff. [ABC News, 11/9/2000; Tapper, 3/2001]

A surprisingly high number of voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, cast their presidential votes for third-party presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and the Gore campaign believes many of these voters intended to vote for Al Gore (see 7:00 a.m. November 7, 2000 and After). The problem lay in Palm Beach’s “butterfly ballot,” designed by Democratic county elections supervisor Theresa LePore, which many voters found confusing (see September 2000). The ballot gave a list of names for offices with corresponding holes to punch, but in the presidential race, Gore’s name lined up more closely with the hole designated for Buchanan, who won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach, over 2,600 more than he won in any other county in Florida. Palm Beach is heavily populated with elderly Jewish voters who were, media reports will say, thrilled to cast their votes for Gore’s Jewish running mate Joe Lieberman; it is doubtful they would have become enthused about Buchanan and his history of anti-Semitism and Holocaust trivialization. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer attempts to characterize Palm Beach as a “Buchanan stronghold.” But Buchanan readily admits that the Gore campaign is probably correct in saying that many Palm Beach voters intended to vote for Gore and not for him. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008] “It does seem to me that those are probably not my votes in those precincts in Palm Beach County,” Buchanan says. “My guess is that I probably got some votes down there that really did not belong to me. I feel—I do not feel well about that. I do not want to take any votes that don’t belong to me.… If the two candidates they pushed were Buchanan and Gore, almost certainly those are Al Gore’s votes, not mine.” Representative Mark Foley (R-FL) says that the Palm Beach voters “may be deranged” in voting for Buchanan, “but they have every right to vote for him” and their votes should not be questioned. Three Palm Beach voters file a lawsuit “seeking a new election claiming the punchcard ballot was so confusing that they accidentally voted” for Buchanan. It is not clear if the Gore campaign or local Democratic Party officials will ask for an actual recount, though some Democratic lawyers call the ballot design “illegal.” [National Journal, 11/9/2000]Analyses: Ballot Confusion Cost Gore between 6,600 and 13,000 Votes - A subsequent analysis reported by the liberal news site Consortium News later alleges that Gore may have lost as many as 13,000 votes due to the “butterfly ballot.” Some voters say they attempted to vote for Gore, punched the hole for Buchanan by mistake, and attempted to correct the error by punching a second hole for Gore. The voting machines recorded those votes as “overvotes” and discarded them without counting them for either Gore or Buchanan. There may be over 10,000 of these particular overvotes remaining to be counted. 19,120 ballots in Palm Beach were disqualified because of double-voting, or “overvoting.” A sample of 144 ballots will be analyzed by Palm Beach election officials, and the results will show that 80 of those 144 ballots—56 percent—show punches for both Buchanan and Gore. If this sample accurately reflects the state of the remaining overvote ballots, then mathematically, Gore lost some 10,622 votes because of the confusion. Adding the approximately 2,700 votes that were given to Buchanan means that Gore lost some 13,000 votes in Palm Beach. [Consortium News, 11/22/2000] A 2001 investigation by The Nation will find that the “lost” Gore votes in Palm Beach number somewhat less than the Consortium News estimate: some 6,600 votes that likely would have gone to Gore were either not counted or inadvertently given to Buchanan. [Nation, 4/24/2001]

By the end of the business day, 64 of Florida’s 67 counties have retallied their machine votes. Presidential candidate George W. Bush (R-TX) leads Vice President Al Gore (D-TN) by 362 votes in an unofficial tally released by the Associated Press. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After) announces that official results from the recount may not be completed until November 14. [Leip, 2008] The Bush campaign’s quick-response team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and Mid-Morning, November 8, 2000) finds the recount tallies sobering and fears a true manual recount. Led by lawyer James Baker, they decide that the only way to ensure victory for their candidate is to stop all recounts. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004]

Unpunched ‘chads’ from punch-card ballots. The voter uses a pencil or stylus to ‘punch’ the chad entirely out of the ballot, leaving a rectangular hole that is read by the voting machine. [Source: Authentic History]The mandated machine recount in Florida’s 67 counties (see 5:00 p.m. November 9, 2000) is completed by all but one county. George W. Bush (R-TX) holds a 327-vote lead. The Gore presidential campaign has requested manual recounts for Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia Counties, where ballot totals are in dispute (see November 9, 2000). Miami-Dade (see November 7, 2000), Broward, and Palm Beach, all of which use obsolete punch-card voting machines, are weighing whether to conduct manual recounts of, firstly, 1 percent of their ballots (sample recounts), and if the results warrant, moving to full recounts. One of the biggest questions is that of so-called “undervotes,” ballots that have no choice registered for a candidate. When a voter attempts to punch through a hole to register a choice but fails to do so completely, that vote is not counted, and instead is classified as an “undervote.” (“Overvotes” are an issue as well with “optiscan” machines, where voters use pencils to fill in ovals corresponding to their choices and feed the ballots into a machine scanner. Sometimes voters fill in votes for both candidates—say, both Bush and Gore—and in such cases voter intent cannot be determined. The machine records no choice. But sometimes voters accidentally “bubble in” both choices, then write “Gore” and an arrow or some other indication of their selection on the ballot. These votes are also not counted, though a manual recount can quickly determine voter intent in these cases. Even stray pencil marks can cause an optiscan ballot to be rejected. Forty-one of Florida’s 67 counties use optiscan machines.) Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), sends young lawyer Kerey Carpenter to Palm Beach to lend her “assistance” in resolving its recount question. Elections board chairman Judge Charles Burton will later recall that while Carpenter identifies herself as a lawyer, she does not inform them that she works for Harris. Instead of assisting in the sample recount process, Carpenter interferes. At one point, after the sample recount has produced some 50 additional votes for Gore, Carpenter objects to the standard of decision; the punch cards have small rectangular holes filled with detachable “chads,” small portions of paper that are pushed through and discarded. The board is using the criteria that a “chad” that is detached at one corner can indicate a vote. Carpenter convinces Burton to change the standard to two detached corners. This decision reduces Gore’s 50 new votes to six. Carpenter, still not revealing her status as a Harris employee, convinces Burton to ask Harris for a “formal opinion” as to what grounds justify a full recount. Burton does so. Harris will set an impossibly high standard for recounts, but will almost immediately be overruled by a judge (see 9:00 a.m. November 13, 2000). [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004]

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), announces she is refusing requests to extend the 5:00 p.m. November 14 deadline for certifying election results (see 5:00 p.m. November 9, 2000) in the interest of what she calls “the public’s right to clarity and finality.” This is her prerogative as secretary of state under Florida Election Code 102.112, though she has the option to extend the deadline. Absentee ballots, by law, can be counted through November 17. Neither Palm Beach nor Miami-Dade Counties have even decided to start recounts yet (see November 7, 2000 and November 10, 2000), and Broward County has not finished the recount it began. Volusia County, also attempting to finish manually recounting all of its ballots (see November 11-12, 2000), sues to extend the November 14 deadline. Lawyers for the Gore campaign join Volusia in the suit, while Bush lawyers file briefs opposing the suit. [Salon, 11/13/2000; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008] In light of Harris’s decision, Broward will choose to abandon its recount (see Evening, November 13, 2000); Palm Beach will decide to delay the recount until it can receive clarification (see 8:20 a.m. November 14, 2000), and resume the recounting shortly thereafter (see 4:30 p.m. November 14, 2000). Miami-Dade, in contrast, will begin recounting (see November 14, 2000). Later in the day, Harris issues what she considers a legal opinion concerning the recounts, but her opinion conflicts with a decision issued by Florida’s attorney general. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000] Harris says that no manual recounts should take place unless the voting machines are broken. Judge Terry Lewis finds that opinion not backed by any state law and overrules her opinion. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Harris has drawn criticism for her apparent partisanship before now. Warren Christopher, a lead advisor for the Gore campaign, calls Harris’s decision “arbitrary and unreasonable.” Representative Peter Deutsch (D-FL) calls her decision “bizarre,” adding, “I honestly think what’s going on is a strategic decision by the Bush campaign to hurt the litigation efforts.” Representative Robert Wexler (D-FL) says: “The only reason to certify the elections at 5 p.m. tomorrow is a partisan one. If she does what she says she’s going to do—certify the elections at 5 p.m. tomorrow—she will have proven her critics correct; she will have proven that she is an emissary of the Bush campaign who is willing to steal an election.” [Salon, 11/13/2000]

Carol Roberts. [Source: BBC]Officials in Palm Beach County vote 2-1 to delay their manual recounts of their election ballots (see November 11-12, 2000) until they are able to clarify whether they have the legal authority to proceed. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), has rejected requests to extend the election certification deadline past 5:00 p.m. today (see 9:00 a.m. November 13, 2000). [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Leip, 2008] Harris actually issues an order stopping the recounts, but her order is almost immediately countermanded by Florida Attorney General Robert Butterworth [Consortium News, 11/19/2000] , who serves as the Gore campaign’s Florida chairman. [National Journal, 11/9/2000] The canvassing board meeting is contentious. The lead Republican counsel, Mark Wallace, demands that County Commissioner Carol Roberts recuse herself from the board because of her “active” involvement in the Gore campaign. Roberts responds that her activity includes having a Gore bumper sticker on her car and attending a single cocktail party for Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate. Election observer Steven Meyer, working with the Democratic Party, writes that he has never heard Republicans complain about Harris’s involvement as co-chair of the Bush campaign. Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore has come under intense scrutiny and criticism for the controversial “butterfly ballot” that she approved for use in the county (see September 2000); many county Democrats blame her for what they believe were some 10,000 votes that should have gone to Gore (see November 9, 2000). Some board members, including LePore, have received death threats; whether these threats came from Republicans, Democrats, or others is unknown. Meyer observes that Republicans such as Wallace mount incessant complaints about ballot handling, and issue frequent demands that already-counted stacks of ballots be recounted again because someone touched or handled them inappropriately. Meyer observes Republican observers using tweezers to pick up tiny “chads” (paper rectangles discarded when a voter punches through a punch-card ballot to cast a vote) and place them in plastic baggies. He also notes that Republicans have placed thousands of Gore ballots in the “questionable” stacks when the ballots plainly indicate votes for Gore. [American Prospect, 12/14/2000]

After her self-imposed deadline of 5:00 p.m. for election results certification passes (see 9:00 a.m. November 13, 2000), Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), announces that George W. Bush (R-TX) leads Vice President Al Gore (D-TN) by some 300 votes, based on returns submitted by all 67 Florida counties. The 300-vote lead Bush currently has is substantially smaller than the 1,784-vote lead he had immediately after the election. Harris says she will comply with a judicial order to consider late returns (see Afternoon, November 14, 2000). She gives three heavily Democratic counties still counting votes until 2:00 p.m. November 15 to submit written explanations as to why they want to add their manual-recount tallies after the deadline; all three counties will comply with her request. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008]

Contradicting her previous statement that she would comply with a judicial order to consider the post-election recount tallies from several counties (see Evening, November 14, 2000), Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), asks the Florida Supreme Court to force Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties to end their manual recounts (see November 14, 2000, 3:40 p.m. November 15, 2000, and 4:30 p.m. November 14, 2000) “pending resolution as to whether any basis exists to modify the certified results” after the November 14, 2000 deadline. Harris argues that manual recounts threaten “the integrity of the ballots.” Harris previously imposed a November 14 deadline for all ballots to be counted and results certified (see 9:00 a.m. November 13, 2000). Palm Beach County officials ask the Florida Supreme Court to decide if they can manually recount their ballots. At 5:00 p.m., the Court rejects Harris’s request to stop the recounts. [Consortium News, 11/19/2000; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Leip, 2008] A judge has already ruled that Harris can refuse to consider recount results submitted after her deadline (see Afternoon, November 14, 2000). A Gore campaign spokesman later says that considering the obstacles Harris has placed in the way of the hand recounts, the situation is analogous to a policeman forcing a motorist to pull over, then blaming him for the traffic piling up behind him. Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes counters with the accusation that the counties still engaged in recounts are “no longer counting ballots; they are ‘reinventing’ them.” And James Baker, the head of the Bush “quick response” recount team, accuses the manual recounters of “subjective” attempts to “divine the intent of the voter.” Such recounts, Baker says, present “tremendous opportunities for human error and… mischief.” Both Hughes’s and Baker’s remarks are apparently intended to imply deliberate falsification of vote tallies, and echo similar charges made by Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media figures. Gore officials note that George W. Bush has picked up 418 votes in manual recounts in six counties: Franklin, Hamilton, Seminole, Washington, Taylor, and Lafayette. The Bush campaign, the Gore officials say, was eager to have those votes added in with the totals. Baker’s counterpart on the Gore team, Warren Christopher, says the fact that “Republicans have hand counted in many of the counties themselves” (see November 19, 2000) belies Republican charges that “we have picked out a certain few counties.” The Bush campaign has also picked up 143 votes from recounting in Volusia County. [Consortium News, 11/19/2000; Consortium News, 11/27/2000]

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), announces that she will not consider any further submissions of recounted election ballots from any Florida counties (see Evening, November 14, 2000). She has already accepted submissions from three counties still conducting recounts (see November 14, 2000, 3:40 p.m. November 15, 2000, and 4:30 p.m. November 14, 2000), and has received written explanations from three counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—explaining why they need additional time to complete their recounts. Palm Beach explained that it had found serious discrepancies between the results of its machine and sample manual recounts. Broward told of a large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade said it had reason to believe that a manual recount would provide significant differences in its results (see November 7, 2000). Harris announces that she finds all three counties’ explanations insufficient and will not include their recount tallies in her final election numbers. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008]

The deadline of midnight November 17 for Florida to count and tally all overseas absentee ballots, under Florida Administrative Code, Chapter 1S-2.013, arrives. [Leip, 2008] A US News and World Report article indicates that the deadline is noon November 18, not midnight of November 17, though this indication is erroneous. Absentee ballots continue to trickle in and be counted throughout the day and into the evening. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Authentic History, 7/31/2011] Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), issues an opinion—in conflict with Florida state law—saying that absentee ballots can be counted even if received by mail up to 10 days after November 17 as long as they were sent from outside the country and postmarked by Election Day. Rumors of large numbers of military absentee ballots, presumably favoring George W. Bush in number, and a large number of ballots from American Jews in Israel, presumably favoring Al Gore, have swirled for days among the media and in both campaigns. A 2004 article by Vanity Fair will speculate that Mac Stipanovich, Harris’s “handler” from the Bush campaign, made the decision to have Harris issue her opinion after deciding that the likelihood of Bush gaining votes from the military absentee ballots was higher than the speculative Gore bounce from the perhaps-mythical flurry of votes from Israel. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Bush gains 123 votes from the absentee ballots (see November 15-17, 2000).

Leon County Judge Terry Lewis rules that Florida law gives Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), “broad discretionary authority to accept or reject late-filed returns,” referring to recounts submitted after Harris’s November 14 deadline (see 9:14 p.m., November 15, 2000). After Lewis issues his ruling, Harris issues a statement hinting she is poised to certify the election when the absentee ballots are in by noon on November 18 (see November 18, 2000). An hour after the ruling, James Baker, representing the Bush campaign team, says George W. Bush and his running mate Dick Cheney “are understandably pleased” with Lewis’s finding. “The rule of law has prevailed,” he says. Gore campaign lawyer Warren Christopher warns against premature “partying” by Republicans, and says the campaign is taking Lewis’s ruling to the Florida Supreme Court. This afternoon, the Florida Supreme Court puts a hold on Lewis’s decision, citing a pending appeal by the Gore campaign (see 5:00 p.m. November 17, 2000). [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008]

The Florida Supreme Court bars Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), from rejecting all post-deadline recount tallies (see 9:14 p.m., November 15, 2000) as well as certifying George W. Bush (R-TX) as the state’s presidential winner “until further order of this court” (see 10:04 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. November 17, 2000). It sets a hearing for Monday, November 20 to hear arguments on the recount dispute. The Court says flatly, “it is NOT the intent of this order to stop the counting.” [Supreme Court of Florida, 11/17/2000 ; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Leip, 2008] Harris is prepared to certify Bush as the winner (see Evening, November 14, 2000), which would give him the electoral votes needed to grant him the presidency (see November 9, 2000). With that no longer a possibility, James Baker, the leader of the Bush “quick response” campaign recount team (see Mid-Morning, November 8, 2000), issues a public threat: the incoming Florida speaker of the House, Republican Tom Feeney, will, if necessary, take matters into his own hands and vote in an independent slate of “electors” who would journey to Washington and vote for Bush in the US Electoral College. Because both houses of the Florida legislature are dominated by Republicans, Feeney could pass just such a bill authorizing that procedure. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Bush and his campaign officials harshly denounce the Court’s ruling. Bush accuses the Court of using “the bench to change Florida’s election laws and usurp the authority of Florida’s election officials,” and states that “writing laws is the duty of the legislature; administering laws is the duty of the executive branch.” However, the liberal news Web site Consortium News notes that Bush seems unaware of the duty of the judicial branch, “a fact taught to every American child in grade-school civics class—that it is the duty of the judiciary to interpret the laws. It is also the responsibility of the courts to resolve differences between parties under the law.” [Consortium News, 11/23/2000]

The Florida Supreme Court hears recount arguments from both the Gore and Bush presidential campaigns regarding whether Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), should consider hand-recounted ballots before she certifies results of the presidential election (see 5:00 p.m. November 17, 2000). Bush lawyers argue that the Court is “without power” to decide which ballots should or should not be tallied. At 9:45 p.m. November 21, the Court unanimously rules that the manual recounts can continue and that Harris must accept those totals in the final results (see 10:04 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. November 17, 2000). The Court rules that the deadline for certifying the election is either 5:00 p.m. November 26, a Sunday, or November 27, at Harris’s discretion. Harris’s staff is caught by surprise by the ruling, downloading it off the Internet instead of receiving a copy from the Court; Harris’s plan to certify George W. Bush as president is blocked. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore welcomes the ruling, saying that both he and Bush should plan their transitions in case either is certified. [Supreme Court of Florida, 11/21/2000 ; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008] The Court says in its ruling that “the right of the people to cast their vote is the paramount concern overriding all others.” Campaign observers have said that if the Florida high court’s ruling went the other way, Gore would concede the election. Some of Gore’s senior campaign advisors reportedly told Gore to stop further challenges if the Florida court decision went in Bush’s favor. [Guardian, 11/22/2000] Bush campaign representatives level charges that the Gore campaign is attempting to “steal” the election. Bush campaign attorney James Baker calls the Supreme Court’s ruling “unjust.” Governor Marc Racicot (R-MT), who has emerged in recent days as an influential Bush campaign spokesman, threatens “some extraordinary” measures to overcome the effects of the Court’s ruling (see 9:00 a.m. and after, November 22, 2000). [Guardian, 11/23/2000]

The Bush presidential campaign files a petition in the US Supreme Court, asking the Court to review the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling that Florida can continue manual recounts, and that those new recount tallies be included in the final election results (see November 20-21, 2000). Bush lawyers argue that the Supreme Court effectively rewrote Florida election law in mandating the recount tallies be counted, by essentially changing the law after the election had occurred; they also argue that Florida judges have no jurisdiction or legal authoritiy to order Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After) to consider manually recounted votes. Both arguments are considered somewhat abstruse and technical. The Bush campaign also claims, with little legal backing, that to recount the votes violates constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection. Gore lawyers say that the matter is up to the state courts, and is not a federal matter warranting the involvement of the US Supreme Court. The Court agrees to hear the case, and sets the hearing date for December 1, 2000. [Supreme Court of the United States, 11/22/2000 ; Certiorari Granted, 11/24/2000 ; Guardian, 11/25/2000; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008] “We believe we stand on both strong political and legal ground for fighting beyond Sunday,” says Gore campaign adviser Ron Klain. After the Court agrees to hear the case, Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team, says she is ready to certify the election for George W. Bush tomorrow night regardless of the outcome of the Supreme Court hearing. “The Department of State is prepared for the earliest contingency, which would be certification Sunday evening,” her chief of staff Ben McKay says. “This will be done publicly regardless of the outcome, which is, of course, unknown at this time.” [Guardian, 11/25/2000] Many Court observers, and some of the justices themselves, are surprised that the case is being heard. The Bush petition for certiorari, or for the Court to take the case, comes to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it is to consider emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Kennedy pushes his colleagues to take the case, arguing that the Court is the true and ultimate arbiter of such matters, though he concedes that the Bush petition is legally questionable. The Court’s conservative bloc—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O’Connor (see After 7:50 p.m. November 7, 2000), and Chief Justice William Rehnquist—agree to hear the case. (Court rules mandate that the consent of four justices, not a majority, is enough to hear a case.) The case is to be expedited in a way far different from the usual sedately paced Court proceedings. The sudden urgency has Court clerks scrambling to change their Thanksgiving plans and contacting the justices they work for. The clerks for the four liberal justices, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, are dismayed by the entire situation. “We changed our minds every five minutes about whether the fix was in,” one clerk later recalls. The liberal clerks find it almost impossible to believe that any Court justice would consider interceding in what is by constitutional definition an executive and legislative matter. Justice Stevens is not convinced of his conservative colleagues’ restraint, and begins drafting a dissent from what he fears will be a majority opinion granting Bush the election. The early draft focuses on the reasons why the Court should have never accepted the case. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004]

A photograph of the Republican operatives mobbing the Miami-Dade elections offices. Those identified in the photograph include Thomas Pyle, Garry Malphrus, Rory Cooper, Kevin Smith, Steven Brady, Matt Schlapp, Roger Morse, Duane Gibson, Chuck Royal, and Layna McConkey. [Source: Pensito Review]Miami-Dade County election officials vote unanimously to halt the county’s manual recount of presidential ballots (see November 7, 2000 and Before 10:00 a.m. November 19, 2000), saying the county does not have enough time to complete its recount by the November 26 deadline. Instead, they vote to recount only 10,750 “undervotes,” ballots that don’t clearly indicate a presidential choice. The decision costs Democratic candidate Al Gore a 157-vote gain from the halted recount process. That evening, a Florida State appeals court denies a motion by Democrats to force Miami-Dade County to restart the manual recount. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008]Opposing Beliefs - The next day, the Florida Supreme Court will also refuse to order Miami-Dade to restart the recount (see 2:45 p.m. November 23, 2000). Press reports say that the decision “dramatically reverse[s] the chances of Al Gore gathering enough votes to defeat George W. Bush.” Gore’s senior campaign advisor William Daley calls the recounts “mandatory” and calls for “the rule of law” to be upheld. For his part, Bush says: “I believe Secretary Cheney and I won the vote in Florida (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000). And I believe some are determined to keep counting in an effort to change the legitimate result.” In light of the Miami-Dade decision, the Bush campaign’s chief legal advisor James Baker invites the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to unilaterally declare Bush the victor, saying, “One should not now be surprised if the Florida legislature seeks to affirm the original rules.” Agitators Disrupt Recount Proceedings - The recount proceedings are disrupted and ultimately ended by a mob of Republicans, some local and some bussed and flown in from Washington by the Bush campaign. The agitators are protesting outside the Miami-Dade County election offices, shouting and attempting to interfere with the proceedings of the canvassing board. Republicans have accused a Democratic lawyer of stealing a ballot. [Guardian, 11/23/2000; Guardian, 11/25/2000]Rioters Made Up of Republican Staffers, Others - Democrats accuse Republican protesters of intimidating the Miami-Dade County officials into stopping the recount. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman says the demonstrations in Miami have been orchestrated by Republicans “to intimidate and to prevent a simple count of votes from going forward.” Six Democratic members of the US Congress demand the Justice Department investigate the claims, saying that civil rights have been violated in “a shocking case of undermining the right to vote through intimidation and threats of violence.” Jenny Backus, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), says, “The Republicans are out of control,” and accuses them of using paid agitators to “create mob rule in Miami.” [Guardian, 11/25/2000] Later investigations show that the “spontaneous protests” by Republican protesters were far more orchestrated and violent than generally reported by the press at the time. Investigative journalist Robert Parry will write that the protests, called the “Brooks Brothers Riot” because of the wealthy, “preppie” makeup of the “protesters,” helped stop the recount, “and showed how far Bush’s supporters were ready to go to put their man in the White House.” He will write that the protests should be more accurately termed a riot. At least six of the rioters were paid by the Bush recount committee, payments documented in Bush committee records only released to the IRS in July 2002 (see July 15, 2002). Twelve Republican staffers will later be identified in photographs of the rioters. The six who can be confirmed as being paid are: Bush staffer Matt Schlapp from Austin, Texas; Thomas Pyle, a staff aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX); DeLay fundraiser Michael Murphy; Garry Malphrus, House majority chief counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice; Charles Royal, a legislative aide to Representative Jim DeMint (R-SC); and former Republican House staffer Kevin Smith. Another Republican is identified as Doug Heye, a staffer for Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA). At least three of the rioters—Schlapp, Malphrus, and Joel Kaplan—will later join the Bush White House. Many of the rioters were brought in on planes and buses from Washington as early as mid-November, with promises of expenses payments. On November 18, 2000, the Bush campaign told activists, “We now need to send reinforcements” to rush to Florida. “The campaign will pay airfare and hotel expenses for people willing to go.” Many of the respondents are low-level Republican staffers from Congress. “These reinforcements… added an angrier tone to the dueling street protests already underway between supporters of Bush and Gore,” Parry will write. Quoting ABC reporter Jake Tapper, Parry will write, “The new wave of Republican activists injected ‘venom and volatility into an already edgy situation.’” Signifying the tone, before the Miami riot, Brad Blakeman, Bush’s campaign director of advance travel logistics, screamed down a CNN correspondent attempting to interview a Democratic Congressman: “This is the new Republican Party, sir! We’re not going to take it anymore!” [Consortium News, 11/27/2000; Consortium News, 8/5/2002; Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Some of the local protesters are summoned to the Miami-Dade electoral offices by angry broadcasts over radio stations with largely Cuban-American audiences; over these radio stations, listeners hear Bush campaign lawyer Roger Stone, coordinating the radio response, say that the recounts intend to disenfranchise Hispanic voters. Republican operatives coordinate the protests by shouting orders through megaphones. [Consortium News, 11/24/2000; Center for American Progress, 12/9/2010] Cuban-Americans voted heavily for Bush in the November 7 election. [Tapper, 3/2001]Details of the Riot; Staffers Assaulted and Beaten - After learning that the Miami-Dade County canvassing board was beginning to examine 10,750 disputed ballots that had not previously been counted, US Representative John Sweeney (R-NY) issues the order to “Shut it down!” (Sweeney is coordinating his efforts with a local Cuban congressman who himself is coordinating the Cuban-American mob response.) Brendan Quinn, the executive director of the New York Republican Party, tells some two dozen Republican operatives outside the Miami-Dade County election offices to storm the room on the 19th floor where the canvassing board is meeting. Tapper later writes: “Emotional and angry, they immediately make their way outside the larger room in which the tabulating room is contained. The mass of ‘angry voters’ on the 19th floor swells to maybe 80 people,” including many of the Republican activists from outside Florida, and joined by local protesters. As news organizations videotape the scene, the protesters reach the board offices and begin shouting slogans such as “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” “Three Blind Mice!” and “Fraud, fraud, fraud!” and banging on doors and walls. The protesters also shout that a thousand potentially violent Cuban-Americans are on the way. Official observers and reporters are unable to force their way through the shouting crowd of Republican operatives and their cohorts. Miami-Dade spokesman Mayco Villafena is physically assaulted, being pushed and shoved by an unknown number of assailants. Security officials, badly outmanned, fear the confrontation will swell into a full-scale riot. Miami-Dade elections supervisor David Leahy orders the recounts stopped, saying, “Until the demonstration stops, nobody can do anything.” (Although board members will later insist that they were not intimidated into stopping, the recounts will never begin again. Leahy will later say: “This was perceived as not being an open and fair process. That weighed heavy on our minds.”) Meanwhile, unaware of the rioting, county Democratic chairman Joe Geller stops at another office in search of a sample ballot. He wants to prove his theory that some voters had intended to vote for Gore, but instead marked an adjoining number indicating no choice. He finds one and leaves the office. Some of the rioters spot Geller with the sample ballot, and one shouts, “This guy’s got a ballot!” Tapper will later write: “The masses swarm around him, yelling, getting in his face, pushing him, grabbing him. ‘Arrest him!’ they cry. ‘Arrest him!’ With the help of a diminutive DNC [Democratic National Committee] aide, Luis Rosero, and the political director of the Miami Gore campaign, Joe Fraga, Geller manages to wrench himself into the elevator.” Rosero stays behind to attempt to talk with a reporter, and instead is kicked and punched by rioters. A woman shoves Rosero into a much larger man in what Tapper will later theorize was an attempt to start a fight between Rosero and the other person. In the building lobby, some 50 Republican protesters and activists swarm Geller, surrounding him. Police escort Geller back to the 19th floor in both an attempt to save him from harm and to ascertain what is happening. The crowd attempts to pull Geller away from the police. Some of the protesters even accost 73-year-old Representative Carrie Meek (D-FL). Democratic operatives decide to leave the area completely. When the mob learns that the recounts have been terminated, they break forth in lusty cheers. After-Party - After the riots, the Bush campaign pays $35,501.52 for a celebration at Fort Lauderdale’s Hyatt Regency, where the rioters and campaign officials party, enjoy free food and drink, receive congratulatory calls from Bush and Dick Cheney, and are serenaded by Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, singing “Danke Schoen,” German for “thank you very much.” Other expenses at the party include lighting, sound system, and even costumes. Media Reportage - Bush and his campaign officials say little publicly about the riot. Some press outlets report the details behind the riots. The Washington Post later reports that “even as the Bush campaign and the Republicans portray themselves as above the fray,” national Republicans actually had joined in and helped finance the riot. The Wall Street Journal tells readers that Bush offered personal words of encouragement to the rioters after the melee, writing, “The night’s highlight was a conference call from Mr. Bush and running mate Dick Cheney, which included joking reference by both running mates to the incident in Miami, two [Republican] staffers in attendance say.” The Journal also observes that the riot was led by national Republican operatives “on all expense-paid trips, courtesy of the Bush campaign.” And, the Journal will note, the rioters went on to attempt to disrupt the recounts in Broward County, but failed there to stop the proceedings. The Journal will write that “behind the rowdy rallies in South Florida this past weekend was a well-organized effort by Republican operatives to entice supporters to South Florida,” with DeLay’s Capitol Hill office taking charge of the recruitment. No similar effort was made by the Gore campaign, the Journal will note: “This has allowed the Republicans to quickly gain the upper hand, protest-wise.” And the Journal will write that the Bush campaign worked to keep its distance from the riots: “Staffers who joined the effort say there has been an air of mystery to the operation. ‘To tell you the truth, nobody knows who is calling the shots,’ says one aide. Many nights, often very late, a memo is slipped underneath the hotel-room doors outlining coming events.” But soon, media reports begin echoing Bush campaign talking points, which call the “protests” “fitting, proper,” and the fault of the canvassing board: “The board made a series of bad decisions and the reaction to it was inevitable and well justified.” The Bush campaign says the mob attack on the elections office was justified because civil rights leader Jesse Jackson had led peaceful, non-violent protests in favor of the recounts in Miami the day before. The campaign also insists that the protests were spontaneous and made up entirely of local citizens. On November 26, Governor Marc Racicot (R-MT), a Bush campaign spokesman, will tell NBC viewers: “Clearly there are Americans on both sides of these issues reflecting very strong viewpoints. But to suggest that somehow this was a threatening situation, in my view, is hyperbolic rhetoric.” Effect of the Riot - According to Parry, the riot, broadcast live on CNN and other networks, “marked a turning point in the recount battle. At the time, Bush clung to a lead that had dwindled to several hundred votes and Gore was pressing for recounts (see November 20-21, 2000). The riot in Miami and the prospects of spreading violence were among the arguments later cited by defenders of the 5-to-4 US Supreme Court ruling (see 9:54 p.m. December 12, 2000)… that stopped a statewide Florida recount and handed Bush the presidency. Backed by the $13.8 million war chest, the Bush operation made clear in Miami and in other protests that it was ready to kick up plenty of political dust if it didn’t get its way.” In the hours after the riot, conservative pundits led by Rush Limbaugh will engage in orchestrated assaults on the recount process as fraudulent and an attempt by the Gore campaign to “invent” votes. No one is ever charged with any criminal behaviors as a result of the riot. [Consortium News, 11/24/2000; Washington Post, 11/27/2000; Village Voice, 12/19/2000; Consortium News, 8/5/2002; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Center for American Progress, 12/9/2010]

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), rejects a request by Palm Beach County election officials to give them a brief extension on turning in their recount tallies (see 3:00 p.m., November 16, 2000). This morning, Republican lawyers successfully disrupted the recounting for an hour by arguing about the order in which precincts should be handled (see 4:00 a.m. November 26, 2000). The county misses the 5:00 p.m. deadline by less than three hours, and thusly leaves almost 2,000 ballots unrecounted, though officials continue to count the remaining ballots. Harris decides to reject Palm Beach’s request after conferring with Mac Stipanovich, a Florida Republican lobbyist serving as her political “handler” (see Mid-Morning, November 8, 2000). [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004; Leip, 2008] Some media reports say that Democrat Al Gore picked up some 46 votes in the Palm Beach recount, though these votes are not added to the tally; Harris dubs Palm Beach’s entire recount null and void. [Guardian, 11/27/2000; Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Steven Meyer, an election observer for the Democratic Party, writes that when the 5:00 deadline arrived, election officials “had reviewed the challenged ballots in all but 51 of the 637 precincts and Gore had received a net gain of 192 votes in the manual recount.” The entire recount is finished by 7:20 p.m., and Gore’s net gain is 215 votes. Meyer learns that though Harris refused to accept the recount votes from Palm Beach County because it missed the deadline, she had accepted recounts from counties where Bush showed slight gains. Meyer writes, “This resulted in the 537 vote ‘official’ lead that the media is reporting.” Of the recount process itself, Meyer writes: “The Republican spin is that all votes have been counted by machine at least twice in every county. The only trouble is the machines don’t read every vote. The counting includes much more than simply reading the dimpled ballots. In our hand recount, we found many, many ballots on which the voter had indicated a preference, but not punched the ballot in the prescribed way. On some ballots, the voter had darkened in the numbers in each race for the candidate he or she wanted. On others, the voter punched out two different numbers, but wrote ‘Mistake’ or something equally as clear, with an arrow pointing to one of the holes. This shows clear intent to cast a vote for one candidate. The tabulating machine records this as an ‘overvote’ because more than one candidate’s number is punched, and the ballot is disqualified in the machine count.” [American Prospect, 12/14/2000]

Bush supporters in Florida celebrate Katherine Harris’s decision to certify Bush as the winner of the 2000 election. [Source: Salon]Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), certifies George W. Bush (R-TX) the winner of Florida’s presidential election, though according to a Florida Supreme Court ruling she can choose to accept recount tallies through November 27 (see November 20-21, 2000). She chooses not to do so. Harris says Bush has a 537-vote lead. Her totals are: Bush, 2,912,790; Vice President Al Gore (D-TN), 2,912,253. The totals include none of the recounted ballots from either Palm Beach or Miami-Date Counties, both of which did not complete their recounts by Harris’s deadline (see 9:00 a.m. and after, November 22, 2000 and 2:45 p.m. November 26, 2000). Ongoing legal actions by both parties keep the election in doubt. Regardless, Governor Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, signs the Certificate of Ascertainment designating 25 Florida electors pledged to George W. Bush and transmits the document to the National Archives as required by Title 3, US Code, Section 6. Three days later, a Florida legislative committee will recommend a special session to name the state’s 25 representatives to the Electoral College, where they will presumably cast their votes for Bush. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008] If Bush is indeed the winner of the Florida presidential election, he has enough electoral votes to assume the presidency (see November 9, 2000). The Gore campaign refuses to accept Harris’s certification, and says it will ask Florida courts to order recounts of thousands of disputed votes. Gore’s running mate Joe Lieberman says, “This evening, the secretary of state of Florida has decided to certify what—by any reasonable standard—is an incomplete and inaccurate count of the votes cast in the state of Florida.” The Gore campaign is working out details of what will be a formal “contest” of the results, and will ask a state judge to order court-appointed “special masters” to complete interrupted recounts of about 2,000 uncounted votes in Palm Beach County and 10,700 uncounted votes in Miami-Dade County. They also want an inquiry into the Nassau County returns, where Gore officials believe Bush was wrongly credited with some 51 votes, and are considering challenging the legality of Palm Beach’s controversial “butterfly ballots.” Gore’s chief lawyer David Boies says: “We’re preparing contest papers that will be filed Monday, as early in the day as we can get them done. Until these votes are counted, this election cannot be over.” Republicans intend to use Harris’s ruling to publicly pressure Gore into conceding the election, pressure the Gore campaign says it is prepared to combat. Miami-Dade County, expected to yield enough votes in a recount to swing the election in favor of Gore, called off its recount under pressure from Republican protesters and due to time constraints (see 9:00 a.m. and after, November 22, 2000). [Salon, 11/25/2000; Guardian, 11/27/2000; Guardian, 11/28/2000] Investigative reporter Robert Parry will later write that Harris deliberately allowed Nassau County to throw out its recounted figures that gave Gore the 51 votes. [Consortium News, 8/5/2002] A brief furor ensues when some media outlets mistakenly report that 500 absentee ballots “not previously counted” were discovered in Broward County. The story is not true. [Salon, 11/25/2000] According to state law, it is only now that Gore can ask for a statewide recount. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004] Former President Jimmy Carter tells a reporter: “More than two weeks will remain before Florida’s 25 electors will have to be named, and then two more months before a new president will be sworn into office. We must not sacrifice speed for accuracy in deciding who has been chosen by the voters to take that oath.” [Salon, 11/25/2000]

After Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of Florida’s Bush campaign team (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000 and After), certifies George W. Bush (R-TX) the winner of Florida’s presidential election (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000), the Bush campaign continues publicly—“ostentatiously,” to quote one London newspaper—preparing for Bush to transition into the White House, naming possible cabinet members and requesting that the General Services Administration (GSA) fund a transition office for Bush to prepare to ascend to the presidency. Andrew Card, a former General Motors executive whom Bush has said will be his chief of staff, says of Bush, “He’s getting ready to be a great president.” Bush’s chief of staff in Texas, Clay Johnson, heads the transition team and Ari Fleischer serves as press secretary. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) has told Senate committee chairpersons to convene their members on January 4, 2001 to begin confirmation hearings on Bush cabinet nominees. The GSA, however, has not gone along with the push. GSA officials say that the 80,000 square feet of Washington office space will stay locked until either Bush or Democrat Al Gore is certified as president. Instead, says Bush’s running mate Dick Cheney, the campaign will set up transition offices funded by private contributions. “We feel it is our obligation to the American people to honor their votes by moving forward and assembling the administration they’ve chosen,” he says. [Guardian, 11/28/2000; Forbes, 2011]

Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Representative Richard Gephardt (D-MO) hold a televised conference call with Vice President Al Gore and his running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), in a show of support for the Gore campaign efforts to stop Florida from certifying George W. Bush as the winner of the state presidential race (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000). “What we’re talking about involves many thousands of votes that have never been counted at all,” Gore tells Daschle and Gephardt. [Guardian, 11/28/2000; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000]

The clerks for the four liberal justices at the Supreme Court—John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—continue their speculation as to whether the Court will actually attempt to decide the presidential election ((see November 20-21, 2000 and November 22-24, 2000), especially in light of Florida’s recent attempt to certify George W. Bush as the winner (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000). At a November 29 dinner attended by clerks from several justices, a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor tells the group that O’Connor is determined to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s decision to go ahead with manual recounts of election ballots (see 3:00 p.m., November 16, 2000). One clerk recalls the O’Connor clerk saying, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” O’Connor has the reputation of deciding an issue on her “gut,” then finding legal justifications for supporting her decision. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Court, O’Connor has already made up her mind. Gore lawyers in particular will spend endless hours trying to craft arguments to sway her vote, when the actual case will come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who originally wanted to accept the case. Many clerks of both liberal and conservative justices have little respect or regard for Kennedy. They consider him, according to a 2004 Vanity Fair article, “pompous and grandiloquent.” They believe he fills his office with elaborate, expensive decorations and trappings, including an elaborate chandelier, to give the idea of his power and importance. “The clerks saw his public persona—the very public way in which he boasted of often agonizing over decisions—as a kind of shtick, a very conspicuous attempt to exude fairness and appear moderate, even when he’d already made up his mind,” according to the Vanity Fair article. Conservative clerks suspect Kennedy of untoward liberal leanings, and have taken steps to ensure that the clerks he receives are ideologically sound. One liberal clerk later explains the conservative justices’ reasoning, saying, “The premise is that he can’t think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school.” By now, Kennedy is surrounded by clerks from the hard-right Federalist Society. “He had four very conservative, Federalist Society white guys, and if you look at the portraits of law clerks on his wall, that’s true nine times out of 10,” another liberal law clerk will recall. “They were by far the least diverse group of clerks.” The conservative and liberal clerks do not socialize with one another as a rule, so it is unusual when, a day after the clerk dinner, Kevin Martin, a clerk for conservative justice Antonin Scalia, visits Stevens’s chambers. Martin went to Columbia Law School with Stevens’s clerk Anne Voigts, and he wants to see if he can explain to her the conservatives’ judicial point of view. However, two other Stevens clerks, Eduardo Penalver and Andrew Siegel, believe Martin is on some sort of reconnaissance mission, attempting to find out what grounds Stevens will cite to argue against overturning the Florida decision. Penalver and Siegel believe Martin is trying to manipulate Voigts, and Martin, after telling them to “F_ck off!” storms out of Stevens’s chambers. Clerks from O’Connor’s staff pay similar visits to other liberal justices, though these conversations do not end so contentiously. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004] O’Connor said to partygoers when the news networks announced the election for Al Gore, “This is terrible” (see After 7:50 p.m. November 7, 2000).

Dick Cheney, the Republican candidate for vice president, orders the opening of a transition office in McLean, Virgina, for the presumptive transfer of power from President Clinton to “President-elect” Bush (see November 27, 2000 and After). The General Services Administration, citing the still-disputed election, refuses to allocate funds or office space to Bush, so Cheney uses private donations to open the office. [Leip, 2008] Cheney made a press announcement of the decision three days earlier. [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000]

Leon County, Florida, Judge N. Saunders Sauls rules against the Gore campaign in the recount issue (see November 28 - December 2, 2000), saying that manual recounts in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties are not warranted, and the Nassau County vote totals should stand. Sauls also refuses to block Florida’s certification of George W. Bush as the Florida presidential winner (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000). The London Guardian calls the ruling a “crushing blow” to Al Gore’s chances of winning the disputed election. Sauls rules that there is “no credible statistical evidence and no other competent substantial evidence” to establish a reasonable probability that Gore might win if granted a hand recount of the undervotes. “This court… concludes the evidence does not establish any illegality, dishonesty, improper influence, coercion, or fraud in the balloting and counting processes,” Sauls rules. The ruling also restores Bush’s 930-vote lead that existed before recount numbers were taken into account (see November 18, 2000). After Saul’s ruling, Gore’s lead attorney David Boies says the campaign will appeal the ruling to the Florida Supreme Court, and that the campaign had always assumed the case would end up in that court. “What has happened today is that we have moved one step closer to having this finally resolved,” he tells reporters, but admits that in this instance, “They won, we lost.” Boies notes that after the incredible effort expended to bring over a million ballots to Sauls’s courtroom, the judge never looked at them. “The ballots were the best evidence of the intents of the voters,” Boies says. “This was the first court in an election contest where the court has refused to look at the ballots.” The Florida high court will hear the appeal on December 7. [Circuit Court of the Second Judicial Circuit, In and For Leon County, Florida, 12/4/2000 ; Guardian, 12/5/2000; US News and World Report, 12/13/2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/17/2000; Leip, 2008]

The Bush campaign continues to engage in pre-inaugural transition activities, giving the public the impression that George W. Bush has won the presidency and is preparing to assume the office (see November 27, 2000 and After). After meeting with his foreign policy advisor Condoleezza Rice, Bush says he has “pretty well made up my mind” on whom to name to his White House staff. His transition team’s slogan is “Bringing America Together.” [US News and World Report, 12/13/2000]

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